I normally register domains with godaddy but their price for nz domains is outrageous US$60 - the cheapest I have found locally is 1stdomains at NZ$25+GST - any one had good/bad experiences with them or has found somewhere cheaper?

Thanks for your reply. Yes I assumed who ever owns the nz tld charges more for it than for a dot com or a dot info. I was impressed with audacity of the nz registrars ofdfer dot infos at $24 though - they are generally less than US$1 on godaddy and a dot com is less than US$10

1) Registrar - The people who you pay to actually register the domain 2) Name Servers - The people who hold your DNS Records3) Hosting - The people who host content which the Name servers point towards

All 3 can be at different places but normally 1+2 or 2+3 are done together.

@LennonNZ - really ? 1 and 2 can be separate? I hadn't come across that - but I admit to having just used US registrars to date. So I should check that a domain registrar will allow me to change the nameservers to my own hosting?

For DNS I used to use iserve - you could have a free hosting account and edit the zone file for your domain - I can't find a way to create more free hosting accounts (I still have one). So I usually register with iserve but have my DNS on dyndns - very good service.

There really is so little margin in domain names it's not funny, and equally, there really isn't much technical stuff either.

As a result, really, one company is as good as another. There are the odd one out there that have pretty manky management interfaces, but if you strike one, you can always transfer the domain to another company anyway.

For .nz domains, I use Discount Domains mainly just because I've done some work for them and Digiweb in the past, but any of the others mentioned can do the job just as well.

LennonNZ: If people are replying I might want to note 1 thing. There are :

1) Registrar - The people who you pay to actually register the domain 2) Name Servers - The people who hold your DNS Records3) Hosting - The people who host content which the Name servers point towards

All 3 can be at different places but normally 1+2 or 2+3 are done together.

Yes I agree, this is an important distinction!

For a small site or personal you can get away with using whoever for your name servers, but if you are a large site you want professionally managed name servers.

LennonNZ: If people are replying I might want to note 1 thing. There are :

1) Registrar - The people who you pay to actually register the domain 2) Name Servers - The people who hold your DNS Records3) Hosting - The people who host content which the Name servers point towards

All 3 can be at different places but normally 1+2 or 2+3 are done together.

Yeah what this guy said is important , There is no point in having your zone files / NS setup with a different hosting provider to your website as you'll only create another dependancy and single point of faliure.

Register the domain with whoever is cheapest and is still going to be in business in 10 years time.